Street roots., June 20, 2014, Page 8, Image 8

street roots
8
June 20, 2014
Paoi Bw en
And the history of
homelessness as
we know it today
BY ISRAEL BAYER
STAFF WRITER
aul Boden is the executive director of
the Western Regional Advocacy
Project, or WRAP. The organization ,is
made up of community organizations around
the United States, including Street Roots
and Right 2 Survive in Portland.
WRAP has focuses on research and
education along with community organizing
to support people experiencing
homelessness.
The group published the groundbreaking
report, “Without Housing,” in 2012, and has
facilitated presenting artwork about housing
from the Depression era in museums and to
the general pubhc throughout the U.S.
The group also is working with
organizations id lead “A Homeless Bill of
Rights,5’ campaign in boih Oregon and
California. The measure would recognize
people experiencing
homelessness with
rights not recognized
today.
We recently sat down
with Paul Boden to talk
about modern day
homelessness and t h e '
history of the
■
cri mftrafea,tf 9fl of pegpW"*11*
on the streets. - -
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I s r a e l B ayer: Let’s
start a t square one. How
did we get to a place o f
< modern day
< homelessness?
o P aul Boden: It’s
° pretty simple, when you
“■ look at it as cause and
Paul Boden
èffect. We started out in
1979 with deep cuts to
our affordable housing
programs. It was the last year of (President
Jimmy) Carter; it was the recession, it was
. the hostage crisis in Iran; and Carter did
across-the-board cuts to all of the federal
programs.
(President Ronald) Reagan came in 1980
with a strong base of support across the
neo-liberal economic folks out of the
Chicago School of Economics. His
revolution was to bring that practice of
governance and of priority-setting to the j !
United States government. We did it in the
“Banana Republic” Countries of South
America and Central America. We knew
how to implement it, and it became the
standard. It still is the standard of how
priorities get set at the federal level.
Between 1979 and 1983 we saw $54
billion a year in cuts to affordable housing.
By the winter of 1982, we were opening up
emergency shelter programs across the
country at a rate we had not seen since the
Great Depression. Here we are now, 30-
years latér.
When you look at it from a global
perspective, what you notice is, the funding
was never restored. You can’t continue to
decimate financial support systems when ;
housing is a commodity and not think that
people without the financial means aren’t
going to suffer from i t You just can’t do it.
And clearly, we are doing i t
The consequence of these policies is
massive numbers of people from all
different geographic and educational
Homelessness: 1960-2014
he 2013 Multnomah County point-in
What follows is an abridged history of
time count identified 2,869 people who
modern day homelessness:
were “literally homeless” sleeping in an
emergency shelter or unsheltered - on the 1960s: Department of Urban
night of January 30,2013.
Development and Housing (HUD) is
This number includes 1,895 people who
created to develop urban housing as
were unsheltered (sleeping outside, in a
part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s
vehicle, or abandoned building) and 974
Great Society.
people who were sleeping in an emergency
•
HUD creates Section 23 Leased Housing
shelter. An additional 1,572 people were
Program as part of the Housing Act of
sleeping in transitional housing on the night
1965, allowing local housing authorities to
of the count.
lease privately owned units and sublease
Over the course of a year more than
them at reduced rents to eligible applicants.
16,000 people will experience
homelessness in Multnomah County alone.
* The Housing and Urban Development Act
■
backgrounds — with all different skin colors,
single adults, gay kids, straight kids, families
— end lip homeless. Across the spectrum,
we see people ending up without housing.
We keep reinventing the wheels of public
planning processes and federal priorities,
thinking if we can just hit this one magic
pill, then we’ll fix it without looking at what
we’ve created, I think it’s a classic example
of cause and effect and connecting the dots,
and going back to. When did the housing
crisis start, what happened right before it
started, and let’s see if that wasn’t the
primary cause of it?
Granted, people will say, ‘Housing isn’t
the only reason people are homeless’. Well,
frankly, mental illness existed before 1983.
Sexual abuse existed before, and sure as
hell poverty and racism existed. So, when
you talk about homelessness, not all of the
other social justice issues, but the issue of
IM A G E C O U R TE SY O F ,
I T H E LIB R AR Y O F
CONGRESS,.
Above, a 1936
poster from the New
York Housing
Authority.
See BODEN, page 9
ushers in a new era of affordable housing
production. Sections 235 and 236 of the act
encourage the private sector to produce
affordable rental and owner-occupied units
through interest rate subsidies. The Fair
Housing Act of 1968 is created, banning
discrimination in public housing.
• USDA Section 515 program creates
38,650 rural affordable housing units.
1970s: Mental health consumers begin
to be deinstitutionalized — many peopte
with mental illnesses end up homeless
or in jail.
• Urban Renewal largely becomes domain
of local governments and is associated with
“commercial revitalization,” gentrification
and demolition of cheap housing stock.
* President Nixon places a moratorium on
ail subsidized affordable housing
production. Congress ends moratorium 18
months later.
1980s: President Ronald Reagan takes
office and dismantles Hew Deal and
Great Society social programs designed
• HUD Budget Authority: $57.7 billion ; tax
expenditures for home ownership: $33.2
billion (in 2004 constant dollars).
Homelessness is not a systemic problem.
HUD subsidizes the construction of
203,046 new housing units.
to assist the poor, most significantly the
federal funding of affordable housing
production.
• HUD Low/Moderate-Income Housing